Final items

From European Voice's Entre-Nous column

12/17/03, 5:00 PM CET

Updated 4/23/14, 8:27 PM CET

UK Foreign Secretary Jack Straw recently compared the complexities of the European constitution to Rubik’s Cube – brainchild of Hungarian Erno Rubik.It prompted London-based Tom Kremer, a fellow Hungarian and toy inventor who put together the marketing strategy for the fiendishly difficult puzzle, to say: “The cube has 43 quintillion configurations and just one satisfactory solution.“The proposed constitution has the same number of possible versions but no single wording that could remotely satisfy the peoples of a continent rich in diversity of language, tradition, law and political culture.” Well, no one said it would be easy…

EU get-togethers will be oh-so-different when the Irish run them, Bertie Ahern has declared. The Taoiseach was distinctly unimpressed with how the conclusions for last weekend’s pow-wow were agreed at around 11am onFriday but the marathon negotiations on fine-tuning an EU constitution didn’t get under way until 5pm.“I only get bored when I’m doing nothing and that’s what I’ve been doing for the last few hours,” the Dubliner observed, promising that the forthcoming Irish presidency would be synonymous with punctuality.

Maltese premier Eddie Fenech Adami may be a giant among Europeans after clinching top gong at the recent EV50 awards, but that’s about the only big thing about his tiny isle. A survey reckons Malta will not only be the smallest EU member state but has the shortest women in the Union. The men are titchy too, taller only than the Portuguese.On one score, though, the Maltese are bigger. Apparently, 60% of the 400,000 population are overweight or obese. So that’s what they mean by ‘enlargement’…

There is something splendidly parochial about the state-aid investigation launched last week by the European Commission’s competition department into JC Decaux, a French advertising company. The question …